cccc’s posterous

Lights, camera, learn?

Did you know that many of today’s online classes come equipped with video lectures from your instructor? When I was enrolled in an online topics of mathematics course it was especially helpful to see the instructor solve the problems. The video lecture library was a godsend for me. The best part was I could cue up the lectures whenever I wanted during the week. It was a completely different learning experience from my traditional classroom days.

When I was in a traditional classroom I would take shorthand notes at a fever pace and even bring in a recording device to capture what I missed. But the most critical element was what he or she was putting on the board, and that was the one piece I didn’t have. I had the notes and the sound but not the video to guide me.

Now I’m not here to tell you that sitting in a traditional classroom is bad, or that taking online classes is the only way to go. But what I will say is that they both serve a purpose. They both educate you. You should try both and see which one suits you better. If you don’t you’re just doing yourself a disservice.

By Eric Hoover

Baltimore

Colleges pay admissions officials to predict the future, and that future is likely to include a revolution in the way many high-school students learn. As attendees of the National Association for College Admission Counseling heard here last week, online education is spreading rapidly among secondary schools, a trend that raises many questions for admissions officials.

On Friday, Brian Lekander, program manager for Star Schools, a distance-education initiative in the U.S. Education Department's Office of Innovation and Improvement, described the rise of virtual learning in elementary and secondary schools. Thirty-two states have virtual-school programs, and 70 percent of all school districts offer online and distance-learning programs, according to the Education Department. In 2008, two million secondary students were enrolled in online-learning programs or in "blended" programs, which include face-to-face and online instruction. In 2000, that enrollment was only 50,000 students.

"It's going to drastically change over time what classroom education looks like," Mr. Lekander said.

It will also pose a challenge to admissions officials, who will need to develop ways of evaluating online course work. After all, over time admissions officials have become familiar with the high schools that many of their applicants attend. Knowing what programs a high school offers and what kinds of students it serves provides crucial context for weighevaluating applicants' preparation. But the fast-increasing array of virtual programs poses a challenge. As a leader of one such program, Jan Keating, said at the conference: "How would you know when you see an online course on a transcript that it's a high-quality program?"

Ms. Keating is headmaster of the Education for Gifted Youth Online High School at Stanford University, which offers computer-based distance-learning courses to high-achieving students. More than 50,000 students from 35 countries have taken courses through the program. To help admissions officials understand how to assess the quality of online programs, Ms. Keating described what questions they should ask.

Does the program have a clear mission? What are the educational backgrounds of its instructors? Do the instructors ever have face time with students? Can the program's organizers provide information about student outcomes? And is it fully accredited?

Beyond evaluating curricula, admissions officials would also want to understand how students interact in online-learning programs. As David Mabe, assistant dean of admission and financial aid at Davidson College, asked, "How do virtual high schools foster a sense of community?"

Ms. Keating described the social interactions of the students in her program. A lack of face-to-face contact, she said, does not prevent students from connecting intellectually—and it may have some key benefits: "You lose the physicality and awkwardness that occurs in high school."

Zach Chaffin, a former student in Stanford's online high school, described how the program had allowed him to interact with students from different places, who had different viewpoints, which prepared him for campus life. While studying in California, he became best friends with a fellow student in Hong Kong. "There actually was a totally legitimate social environment," he said.

Mr. Chaffin, now a sophomore at the Johns Hopkins University, said that online schooling requires a lot of "self-motivation," especially because it gives students more free time than they would have in a traditional high school. "In that sense, now that I'm in college," he said, "it was a really good experience."

A prep school in Massachusetts is in the process of giving away its library books and replacing them with digital versions. Dr. James Tracy is headmaster of Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts and explains the difficult decision.

via here & now

via teachingcollegemath.com

This is a follow-up to my recent research about Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age.  I’ve spent considerable time thinking about how to alter the classes I teach to re-center them on a core of flexible learning.  In all of my classes this semester, students will be completing a variety of learning projects that involve alternative ways to learn (e.g. blogging, making mindmaps, teaching a lesson, making a video presentation, or designing a non-digital game).

The difficult part about including these alternative learning methods is teaching the students all the necessary technology skills first.  Most of my students are the traditional freshman-level age-range  (18-25).  For the most part, they “get” technology (cell phones, facebook, video games, and gadgets), but they haven’t been taught how to do anything productive with technology - at least, not with regards to learning or career skills.

If America wants to continue to be a world-leader, we can do it with a technology advantage - but only if we actually know how to leverage that technology to continue to be more productive.

So, I began to write out a list of the tech skills that I think students should learn before they leave college.  Ideally, these are skills that would be integrated throughout K-12 and college curricula.

Basic Web Stuff
1. Basics of HTML (bold, underline, italics, special characters)
2. How to use EMBED code or make a live link
3. How to make and share a screenshot
4. How to make and share a short video explaining something or asking for help
5. Learn basic abbreviations and emoticons (e.g. ROFL, IMHO)
6. How to build a landing page for your web-based stuff (e.g. iGoogle, NetVibes)
7. How to add gadgets or plug-ins for various sites
8. How to make a simple website (e.g. Google Sites)
9. Build a clickable resume / digital portfolio
10. How (and when) to use collaborative documents or spreadsheets
11. How (and why) to create tags and labels
12. How (and why) to use URL-shortening sites (e.g. TinyURL)

Organization
13. How to set up a web-based calendar and use it to manage your time
14. How to set up and manage an RSS reader
15. How to find a common meeting time (e.g. Doodle)
16. How to set up a communication aggregator (e.g. Digsby, Trillian, TweetDeck)

Communication
17. How to manage email
18. How to write a good “first-contact” email
19. How to write a good subject line
20. How to write a good email response
21. Texting etiquette (when it’s appropriate, when it’s not)
22. How to summarize your thoughts in 140 characters or less
23. How to use Twitter (reply, retweet, direct message)
24. How to determine whether you should share it in a public forum (will it affect your future job prospects, your current employment, etc.)
25. How to manage an online meeting
26. How to give an effective webinar
27. What are the differences between various social networks and how they are used? (e.g. Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn)

Finding and Managing Information
28. How to use web-based bookmarks
29. How (and when) to use library search databases
30. How (and when) to use an image-based search engine
31. How (and when) to use alternate search engines (e.g. Clusty)
32. Who writes Wikipedia articles and when can they be trusted?
33. How to build a custom search engine
34. When can you trust the information you find?
35. How to use article citations to find better references
36. How to manage a bibliography online (e.g. Zotero)
37. How to set up web alerts to track new information (e.g. Google Alerts)

Privacy, Security, and the Law
38. Creative Commons – what is it and how to choose appropriate license?
39. How to read the legalese that tells you who owns it after it is shared online
40. What should you share and how does that change for different audiences?
41. How to manage usernames & passwords
42. How to find and tweak the privacy settings in common social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter)
43. How do data-mining sites get your information? (e.g. participating in FB quizzes)
44. What are the security concerns with GPS-based tracking systems?

Presentation
45. How to determine the audience and appropriate length for your presentation
46. Good presentation design principles
47. Principles of storytelling
48. How to share a set of slides on the Internet
49. How to build a non-linear presentation
50. How to build a flashy presentation (and when to use it)
51. How to find high-quality images that can be used in presentations (with appropriate copyrights)
52. How to find audio that can be shared in a presentation (with appropriate copyrights)
53. How to create a captioning script for a video
54. Ways to caption an internet-based video
55. How (and when) to use a virtual magnifier with your presentation

Ways to Learn
56. How to build an interactive mindmap to organize ideas
57. How to use a blog to track your learning process
58. How to find good sites, blogs, and other online publications for the topic you are learning about
59. How to cultivate a personal learning network (PLN)
60. How to participate in a live learning chat (e.g. TweetChats)

Okay, that’s sixty items and I’ve just scratched the surface (I haven’t even touched on virtual worlds, for instance).

The big problem?  How many educators do you know that have these skills?

Following on the heels of President Obama’s speech to school children across the United States (in which he mentioned Google), Google has made a “back-to-school” announcement of its own. This fall, over five million students at “thousands of schools” in more than 145 countries will be using Google Apps’ Education offering, which represents a user increase of 400 percent from this time last year.

Google is also launching a new centralized site targeted towards recruiting educational institutions. It includes tips on how to switch to Google Apps, the top ten reasons why to make the switch, discussion forums and more. And of course, the site is packed with testimonials from schools like Temple University, that attest to the popularity, cost-effectiveness and ease of use of Google Apps in the educational space.

It comes as no surprise that Google is actively recruiting both student and educational institutions. This market is key because that’s where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to productivity apps. Google also recently announced that its ambitious and potentially powerful email/IM hybrid, Google Wave, will be rolled out to schools first. Google recognizes that brand loyalty is definitely forged at these schools (look at Apple’s strategy), and is undoubtedly looking to capture share of these impressionable minds.

The debate over how online courses compare with face-to-face ones is old. But readers were quick to re-engage it in response to a Chronicle article today that reported on the findings of a major survey of faculty views about online education.

The survey found large-scale faculty engagement with online teaching but also broad suspicion about its effectiveness. Even among professors who have taught online, it reported, nearly half think online learning is either inferior or somewhat inferior to classroom learning. The study also described the amount of time it takes to teach and develop online courses as a significant obstacle.

One reader wrote about reasons for teaching online in the past: student demand, a focus by the administration, even a sense that getting involved could ensure quality. But this reader decided to stop teaching online in the spring after six years of consistent online instruction:

"I am burned out on teaching online. It consumes enormous amounts of time and is not as personally rewarding as face-to-face courses. Teaching online is like teaching without the fun. It is all paperwork, discussion boards, and e-mails. I have decided that I would rather spend my time in front of a class than in front of a computer."

Some readers came to the defense of online education. They argued that the technology made it easier to evaluate the quality of online classes compared with face-to-face ones. They accused The Chronicle of an "editorial slant against online ed." They pointed to other studies like a recent Education Department report. One of them opined that, "Properly done, online education can run circles around any other mode of instruction":

"It can all be done economically, at the speed of light, with all the bells-and-whistles, with dazzling hyperlinks, with great audio, with polling, with great interaction and (best of all) with killer visuals.
 Do the decent thing, on-site: go away.
 Some of your brick-and-mortar campuses will make great monasteries. Others can be converted into office space, into section eight or elderly housing, or even be paved over for parking. ... "

One reader described "quality" as "a very subjective term":

"If faculty members are dissatisfied with the conditions under which they teach online, then it is natural to feel that the online environment is inferior. Although Sloan-C is one of the better sources for research in e-learning, this study must be recognized for what it is: an opinion poll showing that many faculty feel that they are not being well supported in their online teaching. The most important determinants of online learning quality are the learner outcomes/student achievement, which is not what this study measures."

And another stressed that "the common denominator in quality courses is not the mode of delivery but the design of the course":

"I have taught F2F courses and been frustrated with the difficulty I've had getting students to open up and share. 

This semester I'm teaching online for the first time and am thoroughly enjoying the kind of thoughtful, open discussions and sharing that I find rare in my F2F courses. 
There are deficiencies in online learning just as there are deficiencies in F2F learning. As educators, we need to put our energy into designing and developing quality content that allows our students to think critically and become lifelong learners no matter the delivery method."

Another carried the conversation into the subject of grading:

"'Cause and Effect: Instrumental variables help to isolate causal relationships, but they can be taken too far,'" The Economist, August 15-21, 2009, Page 68. 
It is often the case that distance education courses are taught by nontenured instructors, and nontenured instructors may be easier with respect to grading than tenured faculty because they are even more in need of strong teaching evaluations -- so as to not lose their jobs. The problem may have nothing whatsoever to do with online versus onsite education -- ergo misconstrued causality."

But another was alarmed by the finding that so many professors who have taught online feel the quality is somehow inferior:

"Given the cognitive dissonance involved in an instructor teaching an online course admitting that any aspect of it is 'inferior' (a very powerful word emotionally), the fact that as many as 48 percent could overcome the dissonance to admit consciously to themselves, much less to someone else, that the outcome/effectiveness is 'inferior' should be ringing very loud alarm bells about what's happening.
 I would have found it of great concern in that regard if even 20 percent of those who actually teach online admitted openly it was inferior (for the students, aside from the workload/working conditions issue for the instructor), much less 48 percent! Perhaps it's naive of me to think most instructors have a strong enough professional ethic to experience cognitive dissonance over admitting that they're delivering an inferior learning experience to their students, but I don't think so."

Still another made it personal:

"You are going in for major heart surgery. How many of you want the cardiologist to have gotten his/her degrees from excellent online education program? The IRS is prosecuting you in a major tax-fraud case, one that may bring jail time? How many of you want your attorney to have gotten his/her degrees from excellent online education programs? Right."

What's your take on the issue?

Betty is an Adjunct Art Teacher @ cccc

With Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and curator Gary Tinterow

Very good analysis of Twitter move. Please go read the article from Ben Parr.

I think the global trend we are facing with Social Networking applications is very positive and makes sense if we consider the internet as a (re)volution or "universal tool" for "real time" communication.
Personally I think we should also consider it as exactly the opposite! as a new tool for facilitating communication with your neighbours or your coworkers.
I live in an apartment with 8 families and proposed to use Twitter... to coordinate our relation... the first difficulty being that they still don't know or understand it.

This blog is my way to communicate with my coworkers at Cape Cod Community College, what I "see" in regards to the New Technology. I believe those new tools could tremendously help our communication and teaching therefor quality of Teaching for our Students.
But let's face it we created a powerful and universal tool, it will really work only when becoming mainstream...
How many people use Social networking app. @ CCCC? very few I am afraid, and with no coordination...

CCCC's website affirms:
"Start here and you can take your life anywhere."
I guess it means here "physically" at the college
But the new Twitter is saying the same thing! "Share... anywhere in the world"
Where should I be?
At which "Water Cooler" should I be?